Forgiveness and Conflict

During the holiday season this past year, several bloggers wrote posts about forgiveness. Tess at The Bold Life posted wonderful suggestions about how to get through the holiday season with grace, including the suggestion to “Forgive your past and everyone in it.” Albert at Urban Monk wrote about the healing purpose of forgiveness and Daphne at Joyful Days wrote about forgiveness as a gift.

I took their messages to heart and managed to enter potentially stressful family situations almost with a blank slate. Dani at positively present inspired this with her snowflakes post. I wanted to approach my family members with completely clear eyes, trying to see them as though we had just met and I couldn’t wait to get to know them. I let go of the baggage.

I think this is what helped me enjoy the holidays as much as I did. It also helped me to turn the baggage between my mom and me into useful questions and conversations that will hopefully enhance our relationship.

I read several posts about relationships in the past few months that I’m sure have informed my actions recently. Danielle at White Hot Truth wrote about how focused she was about sending her love outward towards many important world causes and realizing that she had been neglecting her love at home.

Corey at Simple Marriage writes about relationships all the time and a few have jumped out at me in particular. The first one is from back in November when he wrote about how much he loves others, which connects to some questions I raised in my marriage post about truly asking someone “How are you?”. This month, he has been delving into the idea of our lives as a story and our responsibility to our happiness to write the stories we want to be in.

In “A Simple Marriage in 2010” Corey got me thinking about the conflicts I have been avoiding in my relationships. The follow up to that, called “Move Into the Conflict and Live a Great Story”, encouraged me to identify the conflict and then move into it. As I have written before, conflict terrifies me and I would much rather smooth things over than face it head on. We’ll see how this goes.